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Reynolda House Museum of American Art will open Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, a landmark exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum that examines the artist’s self-crafted persona through her art, her dress, and her progressive, independent lifestyle. One day before the exhibition opens to the public on Aug. 18, members of the media are invited for a preview of the exhibition and interview opportunities with its curators.

More than 180 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and personal objects will be on view August 18 – November 19, including jewelry, accessories, and garments from her wardrobe, some designed and made by the artist herself. The exhibition reveals the artist’s powerful ownership of her public and artistic identity and affirms that she embodied the same modern aesthetic in her self-fashioning as in her art.

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is the only venue in the Southern U.S. for Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, and the exhibition is the largest ever installed by the 50-year old museum. It will be on view in five galleries throughout the museum.

PHOTOGRAPHY & VIDEO OPPORTUNITIES Still photographers with no flash may photograph all exhibition galleries. Video photographers (including those with tripod and external lighting) may shoot in three of the exhibition galleries. Museum staff will provide escort to all galleries.

INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES

· Wanda Corn, Curator of the ExhibitionCorn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University and wrote the influential and well-illustrated book that accompanies it.

· Phil Archer, Coordinating Curator Archer is the Betsy Main Babcock Director of Program & Interpretation at Reynolda House and oversaw the exhibition’s complex installation in the Reynolda House galleries.

WHENThursday, Aug. 17, 10 a.m.–noon

Media may drop in anytime during the preview window. Interviews will be arranged upon arrival. Appointments for television reporters are preferred and should be requested with the RSVP: 10 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 11 a.m., or 11:30 a.m.

WHEREReynolda House Museum of American Art2250 Reynolda Rd., Winston-Salem, N.C. 27106(enter main entrance; spots will be reserved for media in Parking Lot A)

“The exhibition is an eye-opening look at Georgia O’Keeffe,” says Phil Archer, Reynolda House’s coordinating curator for the exhibition. “She was as much a pioneer of American modernism as she was an innovator in what people today call ‘branding.’ O’Keeffe created an unwavering image of herself through her wardrobe, her homes, and in the ways she posed for pictures.”

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern follows O’Keeffe’s life from a young girl in Wisconsin to a pioneer of modernism and a style icon living on the New Mexico desert. Family photographs, yearbooks, and personal letters are early evidence that O’Keeffe dispensed with the bows and frills worn by young women and began to create her signature clothing style as a high school student. The exhibition then proceeds to her time in New York in the 1920s and ’30s, when she lived with Stieglitz and made many of her own clothes.

The artist’s New Mexico years, first as a summer artist and later as a permanent resident, span from 1929 to 1986. The exhibition demonstrates how the desert landscape—the yellows, pinks, and reds of rocks and cliffs, and the blue sky—inspired both her painting and dress palette. A selection of paintings, kimonos, and Hong Kong-tailored clothes also explores the influence and importance of Asian aesthetics in her iconic look.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is the largest exhibition ever mounted at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. The show’s 180 objects, which include 38 of O’Keeffe’s works from all periods, extend from the Mary and Charlie Babcock Wing through the 64-room country manor house built by R. J. and Katharine Reynolds in 1917, which today serves as the setting for Reynolda House’s permanent collection.

Reynolda House’s unique art museum-within-a-residence enables it to present Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern with echoes of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed 291 gallery in New York, exhibiting artwork and personal objects in an intimate setting. In particular, private rooms on the second story of the house—once bedrooms of the Reynolds family—will showcase O’Keeffe’s modernist uniforms: the Black Suit and the Wrap Dress.

“O’Keeffe’s clothes will look especially splendid in Reynolda House’s domestic-scaled spaces, as will her paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the company of the museum’s superb collection of American art,” says Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University, who curated the exhibition and wrote the influential and well-illustrated book that accompanies it. This is the first publication to study and showcase the artist’s dress along with her homes.

The idea for this exhibition arose when Corn learned that the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe owned dresses, coats, suits, casual wear, and accessories that the artist left behind when she died in 1986. A majority of the clothing, representing 60 years of her life, comes from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the closets of O’Keeffe’s two New Mexican homes. The museum now owns both houses and their belongings.

“The Georgia O’Keeffe who emerged from my research was an artist not only in her studio but also in her homemaking and self-fashioning,” Corn said. She turned her research into an exhibition, curated for the Brooklyn Museum, where Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern opened on March 3, 2017, and continues through July 23, before it travels to Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Its final venue will be at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, December 16, 2017 to April 1, 2018.

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Sarah R. Smith

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Reynolda House Museum of American Art2250 Reynolda RoadWinston-Salem, NC 27106